Tech Hires See Russia’s Sberbank Catching Up on Big Data
- Doubles data IT hires in 3 months as 8% of staff to go in 2017
- Data partnerships to make more money than banking: deputy CEO
Moscow.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesRussia’s biggest bank is paying up to keep the nation’s best tech talent from emigrating to Silicon Valley. To analyze 135 million customers, it needs the power of big data.
Sberbank PJSC, which holds 46 percent of Russian retail deposits, says it’s luring experts in the field with some of the highest salaries at the state-owned lender, paying almost $100,000 a year for the most experienced recruits, even as it shrinks its workforce at a 16,000-strong blanch network. The bank will double the number of “data scientists” to 400 over the next three months as it increasingly looks to technology to drive earnings, Deputy Chief Executive Officer Vadim Kulik said in an interview.
Sberbank, which announced Wednesday that it plans to cut 8 percent of its staff next year, has withstood Russia’s two-year economic crisis by keeping a lid on bad loans. Its stock is up more than 70 percent in 2016. For its next leg of profit growth, Chief Executive Officer Herman Gref is turning his attention to the bank’s vast troves of customer information.